College Student Slapped With $84,000 Bill for FOIA Records

"It's been very stressful for him," says the student's mother. "He just wants to go to school. He wants to do well. He wants to get an education."

How much would you pay for information? A student at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan is facing an $84,000 bill for records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to an ongoing school investigation against him.

Carrie Uthe, the student's mother, told local news station WZZM 13 earlier this year that the bill was surprising. "They did give us a documentation to show that breakdown, but that still made no sense," said Uthe. "It's been very stressful for him. It has really played on him hard. He just wants to go to school. He wants to do well. He wants to get an education."

It's not uncommon for FOIA requests to come with a fee, meant to compensate for employee time spent on complying with the request and redacting ineligible information. However, WZZM13 spoke with Mike Walsh, an attorney and adjunct professor at GVSU, who said that he's never seen a FIOA bill this hefty.

"Government agencies have a right to charge for their time and service to provide records, but the whole spirit of the law is to open things up, to share records with the true owners, which is you and me," Walsh said. "So obviously that's daunting for anybody to get a bill for $84,000 and it prevents people from going on to the next step of litigating or whatever they're going to do to get things worked out. So that's, that's why I find it troubling." 

According to a statement from GVSU administrators, the bill was so large because the student made an overly broad request. "Grand Valley used its normal process in calculating the fee for this request. The request is very broad would [sic] involve more than 59000 emails over a specified period," their statement reads. "Fulfilling the request would require a qualified employee to sort through each individual email and attachment to search for and redact protected and personal information. Our FOIA officer has offered potential strategies that could narrow the inquiring party's search to help reduce costs." 

Hefty fees aren't the only barrier to receiving public records under FOIA. Long wait times also often prevent requesters from getting documents. "FOIA requests can take years to fulfill, unless you can afford to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit," Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote in the magazine's December 2024 issue. "Agency FOIA officers routinely abuse exemptions to hide records. The process is difficult even for experienced reporters to use for newsgathering."

"FOIA is simply no longer up to the task of handling the volume and diversity of records being created by the government, the number of requests for those records, or the disputes between requesters and agencies withholding records in bad faith," Ciaramella adds.

Comments

[Don't look at me!]

Just put them online.
Fuck redacting.

[Squirrelloid]

No kidding.

All government documents should be presumptively available unless specifically withheld, generally with a public justification. And they shouldn't require a request. With the modern internet, it should be online and searchable, no need to ask permission.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

It's too obvious. But it would be awesome if that was made the law of the land. The bureaucrats would have the hissy fit to end all hissy fits.

[damikesc]

I'd ask WHY do government agencies have the right to charge you for their time.

YOU paid for everything to begin with. Government agencies aren't exactly money makers.

FOIA requests should be free. Hell, they should be forced to smile and thank you when they deliver the documents to you.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

You're not being charged for creating the documents, but for finding and redacting and copying them.

[n00bdragon]

Yes, but you already pay that government employee's salary anyway. Whether he finds your documents or uses his time to masturbate should be at your discretion. There shouldn't be an extra fee associated with doing productive work.

[ducksalad]

What if two different citizens want the employee to do different things with their time?

For example, I want Pam Bondi to personally respond to FOIA requests I and a team of three others will be making. One new request every hour. We will work in shifts 20 hours per day, 365 days per year. She can have midnight-4am each day for personal time off. We understand that it may take some time to come up with the originally requested documents, so in the meantime we'll expect hourly updates with a chart showing, in 3 minute intervals, which request she worked on, and the current status of each request, with affidavits that the time has been properly accounted for.

And we already paid for this so it had better be free.

[n00bdragon]

Is this an option? I would be the fourth person requesting this.

[Rossami]

I don't know. Those government records could include details about me that I'm not comfortable having you or some random stranger getting hold of merely because that email met the search terms of your over-broad FOIA request. One of the points of redaction review is to protect innocent third-parties. And that inevitably will cost money.

Yes, there's a lot of FOIA abuse and yes, it's too-often an excuse to cover up government wrong-doing. But your approach throws the baby out with the bathwater.

[Vernon Depner]

There is no baby. The government should not be interacting with citizens in secret except in rare circumstances. Government activities that require such secrecy should be abolished.

[Rossami]

That would require abolishing all taxes, property records, most court records, many medical records (at least until you kill medicare and all other medical payments), social services, educational records, investigations that prove to be unfounded and pretty much everything that government does.

When we reach your anarchic utopia, I will consider the point. Until then, yeah, there's a baby that you're throwing out.

[Don't look at me!]

This is a school.

[Rossami]

So education records, medical records (absences, IEPs, vaccination confirmations, etc), disciplinary records, family financial information (for financial aid, for example) and so on. Still quite a lot that of information that I might consent to give the school yet which you (a random third party) have no business seeing.

[Vernon Depner]

So, what would be the down side?

[Squirrelloid]

Government shouldn't be accessing, much less storing, citizen medical records. That's just incredibly creepy, and it should stop.

Tax records are already not accessible. I'm not fussed about them not being publicly available. (File that under: public reason not accessible).

Court records should be and, afaik, generally are publicly available. Very few exceptions. (The reason for sealing some court record should be public).

Property records are public.

(Federal) government should not be keeping educational records, period. This should be restricted to local government, and those belonging to students should be firewalled from everywhere but the school that originated them. Public reason not available.

And so on. If government does it, it's presumptively public unless a good public reason can be given why it shouldn't be.

[Rossami]

It's a university so the university health clinic not only accesses but is actually generating those citizen health records. But even if you privatize the health clinic, you've got mandatory vaccination verifications and other public health laws that most people think are good ideas yet would be blocked by your rule.

Agree that tax records are redactible. Doesn't change the need for time (and money) to do that redaction. Ditto for the subset of court records that are not publicly available but which might legitimately be in the university's possession. By the way, there's also the possibility of records about the university's own case(s) subject to attorney-client privilege.

Again, this is a university so of course they will have educational records.

[Carlos Inconvenience]

Yep. And here the government offered to work with him to figure out what he wanted but the kid went ahead with an overly broad request : “ Our FOIA officer has offered potential strategies that could narrow the inquiring party's search to help reduce costs."

[Carlos Inconvenience]

Funny as hell all the people on here saying nothing should be private while posting under pseudonyms.

[n00bdragon]

Citizens have a presumptive right to privacy. The government does not.

[Squirrelloid]

This.

[ducksalad]

A huge fraction of the government's documents are about citizens.

[Carlos Inconvenience]

Government records are chock full of citizens’ private information. medical histories, education records, social security numbers, etc. but if you think that stuff shouldn’t be private, feel free to post your real name and pics of your drivers license and social security card.

[Nelson]

“ Just put them online. Fuck redacting.”

The request was for 59000 emails. You think all government emails should be posted online?

[n00bdragon]

Describe just one negative consequence thereof.

Assume we aren't talking about top secret military battle plans but every other government communication.

[ducksalad]

Right, every veteran that uses VA and every person that has Medicare should have their medical records posted online, right down to the doctor's notes about their ED prescription.

Or just limiting it to schools: every time two instructors compare notes to see if a student cheated on an exam, and decide likely but not certain enough to take any action (which, BTW is by far the most common outcome, and the student never even knows about it): that should be posted on the Internet?

Every time we successfully resolve a "he's harassing me" complaint by sending an informal e-mail telling the completely unaware "offender" that the "victim" is a bit sensitive and would prefer to be left alone, we need to post it on the Internet so that the assholes here, and their mirror-image assholes at DailyKos can involve themselves and make sure it escalates instead of goes away?

Nope, bad idea.

And 59,000 e-mails is, to me, clearly using discovery as harassment, fully intending to waste taxpayer-funded time.

[n00bdragon]

NoOoO... not the socialized education and the socialized medicine! Won't someone please think of the socialized medicine and education?

Killing the VA and the public school system would be perhaps the best possible outcome of such a change. Fuck them both.

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

How would you go about execution of VA’s contractual duties?

[Squirrelloid]

Yes, unless an individualized and public reason can be given for not making it publicly available.

[Rossami]

Well, that would be the redaction effort leading to this $84,000 cost estimate. (That estimate strikes me as high by a factor of about 2 or 3 but that doesn't change the principle of the thing.)

[AT]

Well, at the very least, they have to redact for the various exceptions that a FOIA request is legally allowed to withhold.

[Zeb]

Freedom isn't free, apparently.

[Rick James]

How much would you pay for information? A student at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan is facing an $84,000 bill for records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to an ongoing school investigation against him.

The story behind the story.

[Dillinger]

no kidding.

[Sal Paradise]

"Government agencies have a right to charge for their time and service to provide records"

Already paid you assholes

[Stupid Government Tricks]

You're paying for finding, redacting, and copying. Not for creating the original document.

[Vernon Depner]

We're paying for all of it. Duh.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Yes, WE are paying for YOUR request. Don't you believe in personal responsibility?

[Vernon Depner]

WE are paying the salaries of public employees. They should not be charging individuals for their services. We have met our "personal responsibility" by paying our taxes. If you would like to propose that we move to a fee-for-service model for paying public employees, let's hear it. Or, if you would like to limit public records requests on the grounds that they're too expensive for government subdivisions to comply with, let's hear that.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

OK, gotcha. You want everyone to pay for everyone's FOIA requests. You don't believe in individual personal responsibility. You are a collectivist.

[Vernon Depner]

You are an idiot.

[ducksalad]

Vernon, do you have any limit of what percentage of the government employee time we all paid for should be spent on responding to trolls making FOIA requests for the specific purpose of wasting time?

As you may have guessed, I'm not a huge Border Patrol fan. Suppose I make 100 FOIA requests per day from the Border Patrol, each requiring 500 man-hours to respond to.

Is your plan to take guys off the border to handle it, or to raise taxes to cover my FOIAs and the border at the same time.

[eyeroller]

This is a price quote, not a bill.

The headline is basically false.

(It's an unreasonable quote, but it's not a bill.)

[Vernon Depner]

It's quite possible he'll be able to get the information he needs with a much narrower request. He needs to consult someone with expertise in this.

[AT]

He was offered that.

[Gasman]

a case of malicious compliance from the university
'you want documents, you got documents'.

Even with an AI buddy sifting through everything he gets in this document request, it is going to take his lawyer a lot of hours to find the smoking gun document (if even it exists, or has not been redacted)

[Longtobefree]

Yet more proof college admins are way overpaid.

[Eeyore]

That's how much it will cost to find and redact or delete the piece of information that he needs.

[AT]

Honestly, just ask them for a fee schedule.

I mean, we're talking 59,000 emails. That's $1.50 per email, regardless of its length or attachments. Doesn't seem unreasonable. Seems like HE'S being unreasonable. Especially since the FOIA officer offered to help him mitigate costs by better circumscribing his request.

And then there's this:

‘It's just not fair’, from the source article.

Wah. Spoken like a true entitled whiner.

[Incunabulum]

Let me get this straight.

A 'qualified' employee will run an automated keyword search and then potentially censor the documents returned by that search?

And this will take their full attention for a whole year? Which is why the fee is at 'salary level'?

Is that what they're saying?

[AT]

Assuming they're OCR'd - which sucks and fails all the time when it comes to searchability. And never mind the fact that you might miss a search term.

No. Try as we might to automate it, redaction is still ultimately a page by page endeavor. And it's horrible and monotonous. And for a FOIA it requires someone who has clearance to see the information that would be FOIA exempted by law which needs redacting.

So yea, that's what they're saying.

And it's not like they're even being unreasonable. Emma is breathlessly crying, "$84000!" but apparently can't do fourth-grade division.

[Peter Kreeft taught me LOGIC, BEWARE !!!!!!!]

A 'costly' "Freedom"
Freedom if you can buy it 🙂

[Winston in Wonderland]

At $40 per hour, it took a "qualified employee" a full year to sort through the e-mails?

I don't think so.

[I am not paying for your stinkin' subscription]

The Feds make it free now if they do not respond in 30 days. Even if you are not in a protected class like news reporter. Sometimes, it's worth a shot.